IMHO if they didn't want to use some space for portable applications, why did they buy a U3 stick? There are plenty of just-storage flash drives out there. Just because a product doesn't suit you, does not imply it doesn't suit other people, or that they might actually value those features you don't use.

It looks like a complete Perl + compiler install will be around 300MB, just Perl would be less. I'm not going to package it for U3, as compressing and uncompressing at runtime would break the plug-in-and-Perl utility I've created.